Presentation and inquiry with John Duncan, July 16, 2026
“A Brief History of Psychological Time.”
We met at Esquimalt Gorge Park Pavilion. A brief introduction to the nature of holistic consciousness and our fragmentation from it as separately identified individuals (egos) preceded our investigation into psychological time and its origin. Consciousness, or more inclusively, life energy as it pertains to all life on earth, can be compared to electricity coming out of a wall socket. It can energize a fan, a computer, an iron etc. which are all very distinct items but the “life force” of all of them is identical. Similarly, the life force in the squirrel, the tree, the human, etc. is identical, and manifests behaviorally via the various nervous systems of those beings. On top of that it was suggested that this energy flows between beings as well like a river. All is energy.
So, what is psychological time and why did Krishnamurti refer to it as the enemy of mankind? Why did he refer so often to the necessity of the ending of time?
The natural state is an ever new “now” with no trace of the past or future. A state of creation. Where is the problem? The continuity of a me, existing as dead memory brought alive by thinking it into the present and projecting a future exists as a contradiction to this fact of the moment being ever new. Still, why a problem? Krishnamurti asserts that the origin of conflict is this division, that fragmenting consciousness into individual selves is the root of an unending, unsolvable fear. He says, “Life, death and Love are the same movement, one must permanently die to know what love is.” And what we have done is taken death out of the present and put it into the future, hence the ability to maintain a continuity of the self. This continuity is a contradiction to the fact of an evernew moment.
The problem? Fear….of death in the future, rather than living with death as mentioned earlier.
Krishnamurti on the root of fear:
May I ask, “Is there such a thing as pure fear, fear by itself?” There is no absolute fear, fear is always of something, look at it carefully and you’ll see, all fear, however unconscious, is the result of thought. All fear, of the outer, of the inner, is basically the fear of extinction, the fear of not being, not being this or that or just not existing. We know all existence is transitory and yet we crave psychological permanence. And thus craving is the origin of fear. To be free from fear we must explore to its very roots this idea of permanence.
Our bodies are sending out an alarm regarding our imminent death, but that death is in the future. There is nothing we can confront in the present, but remember, the future is now in the present. Our only response in the present is fear, unending fear. This is the danger of psychological time.
What are we to do?
Bringing death back into the present, where life, death and love are one movement seems to be the reasonable answer, but that would mean the end of the continuity, the me, ME! This is the challenge, the stopping point for most, because a psychological death has all the resistance to allow that issuing from the body’s survival instinct as a physical death. The will to live is protecting the body and also the imaginary entity that exists by thinking because thinking has a physical component to it and the body recognizes it as worthy of protection.
K’s teaching is as much about ‘living with death’, psychological death, as it is about anything. If we do not meet this conflict of psychological time, if we do not end this contradiction, fear will go on and all of our attempts to distract ourselves and all of the misery we create by denying it will go on, including violence and war, which is an attempt to face our fear of death in the present by physically killing someone we believe to be a threat to our survival instead of allowing our ego to die.
- John Duncan
